Vegeta coughed up a handful of blood as he watched the battle in front of him through the thin treeline in front of him. His body's fight or flight instincts… no, freeze or flight instincts were screaming at him like a cluster of airhorns inside his brain, and his head was silently agreeing with the 'flight' half, but just about everything else in him simply wouldn't allow him to do so.
The Namekian had a clear upper hand. Uninjured, he rained extendable fists down on the black-haired humanoid, faster than Vegeta's eyes could follow.
Though, all Vegeta could see of the humanoid's body was the black hair, flickering in the wind as the head that the follicles were attached to dodged the gatling-fists like a leaf in the wind.
A wind which blasted into Vegeta's face with enough power to make the trees in front of him, ancient, deeply rooted trees, visibly tilt and creak.
The residual force from the two fighters' combined power was so strong that Mel, far away, was completely unable to get any closer. Vegeta clawed at the dirt below him, rooting himself with sheer willpower alone as the pressure threatened to flatten him like a pancake.
Then, things somehow got worse.
Slug stopped the Gatling-fist attack and began pursuing the smaller Celatian, using his raw flight speed, which perfectly matched Zeck's Hyper-Motion-Technique.
Zeck responded by blasting off in a straight line, using not only his Hyper-Motion technique, but also shockwaves for stability and directional change.
The chase lasted thirty seconds.
In those thirty seconds, a large portion of the forest was obliterated. Not upturned, but simply vaporized by the power of Zeck's shockwaves.
Zeck even blasted Slug with a couple of quick Regalia Blasts as he exploded through the terrain like the world's most effective demolition crew. Slug caught one in the shoulder. It mildly annoyed him. He brushed the second aside with his left hand, and dodged a third with a quick, yet small, trajectory alteration.
The Regalia Blast that Slug brushed aside exploded near Vegeta, who was violently thrown aside, an arm bone snapping on impact. Nobody noticed.
Then, Slug caught up to the Celatian warrior-scientist and grabbed him by the shoulder, positioning him for a bone-crushing throw.
As the Namekian spun the Celatian around, though, Zeck smiled the specific smile of someone who'd just set a trap, and had it walked straight into.
Then, the Celatian warrior-scientist unceremoniously thrust the blindingly-condensed bundle of pure ki that he'd spent the last thirty seconds collecting directly into the Namekian's stomach.
Even from his low vantage point, Vegeta could see the bright column of light that erupted out of Slug's back as Zeck opened a hole directly through the Namekian's torso.
For a moment, all three stilled.
Vegeta's heart nearly burst from his chest at the sheer power of the attack. Even without ki-sense, he could tell that particular attack was in the mid ten-millions class of power… something so far beyond him that it made the Prince of all Saiyans look like a cheap joke.
Zeck hadn't been expecting his attack to actually land as it had. He'd made the plan, set the trap, condensed the energy… but if it were someone with the combat instincts of Pepper, the sheer aggression of Tater, or the calm analysis of Lynn or Tarble, that sort of sneak attack would never have hit. The fact that it had made all of Zeck's backup plans suddenly useless. His brain stalled, frantically recalculating based on this new variable.
As for Slug, his hand let go of Zeck's shoulder, and he staggered backward. His other hand passed through the hole in his chest once, feeling it, not believing that it was actually there.
Zeck had tricked him into ripping his own arm off earlier. That was extraneous. This was not. This was real damage.
The worm in front of him… had seriously injured him.
The last time that had happened was… his fight with Cooler, a full century ago, back when his body looked similar to this, but just a bit older.
He'd only barely managed to walk away from that battle, so severely drained that he hadn't even been able to finish it, which had led to him living in fear of the Frost Demon's retribution for years before he'd finally realized that Cooler had left him as a sign of something as close to respect as Frost Demons got.
That fight had been the beginning of a sort-of end for the Super Namekian. The strain from the battle had kickstarted the slow senescence, or biological death, of Slug's cells on a microscopic scale. It'd taken a century for his body to get to its former, almost naturally-dead point, but without that battle, that process would likely have held off for another fifty years or more.
The trauma came to the surface as his natural healing factor closed the hole.
For the first time during this battle, aside from when he'd been forced to regrow his arm, Slug could actually feel the drain on his ki reserves.
That scared the Namekian warlord in ways that he didn't quite understand. He hid the fear under a smirk as soon as it bubbled up… along with all of the power that he'd been keeping hidden.
All hundred million units of it.